Colombia’s general anti-tax strike has turned into a mass protest movement
and become violent, writes Laura Brown
The pandemic has transformed the way we live, attend school and do our work, and our cities must change accordingly
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/ 23 December 2009
Colombia said on Tuesday Farc guerrillas slit a state governor’s throat hours after they kidnapped him during a brazen raid.
Colombian troops have killed a Farc guerrilla commander accused of ordering extortion and bombings around Bogota, said authorities.
High-profile hostage Ingrid Betancourt was shocked when aid workers supposedly transporting her to a new location turned out to be state soldiers.
The founder and chief commander of Colombia’s Farc rebel force, Manuel Marulanda, has died after more than 40 years fighting the state from jungle and mountain camps. If confirmed, the death of Manuel Marulanda, who organised the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas in the 1960s, would be the heaviest blow yet to Latin America’s oldest insurgency.
Thousands of Colombians were evacuated around the Nevado del Huila volcano in the south-west part of the country on Tuesday after an eruption of ash and gas that caused no damage but put authorities on high alert. ”Constant monitoring of the situation will be maintained,” said a statement from Colombia’s Interior Ministry.
Colombia’s military said on Saturday its troops had killed a top rebel commander in an attack on a jungle camp across the border in Ecuador in a severe blow to Latin America’s oldest guerrilla insurgency. Raul Reyes, one of seven members of the secretariat of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, was killed in an operation that included air strikes and fighting with rebels across the border.
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/ 14 January 2008
A Colombian woman freed last week after six years as a rebel hostage arrived in Bogota on Sunday and headed straight for a reunion with her son, Emmanuel, born in a jungle camp and then taken away by her captors. A slightly dazed Clara Rojas arrived from Caracas, where she had been since leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez brokered her release.
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/ 10 January 2008
An airborne operation to pluck two hostages from their rebel captors deep in the Colombian jungle lurched back to life on Thursday, after a botched handover attempt collapsed 10 days ago. Two Venezuelan helicopters departed for Colombia at dawn, said a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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/ 30 November 2007
Colombian officials on Friday showed recently seized videotapes of rebel-held hostages, among them three United States defence contractors and a former presidential candidate — the first images in years providing evidence the captives may be alive.
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/ 26 November 2007
Colombia and Venezuela faced the worst crisis in their relations in years on Monday after the Colombian president accused Venezuela of seeking to install a Marxist regime in his country and Caracas ”froze” relations between the two countries. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said earlier he was putting bilateral ties in a ”freezer”.
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/ 21 November 2007
Colombia upset the leader of the South American qualifying round for the 2010 World Cup with a 2-1 victory on Tuesday in Bogota over Argentina. Argentina still tops the table to advance to the World Cup in South Africa with nine points from four games, but Colombia is now second on eight points.
Nine people, including four children, were shot and killed at a farm in southern Colombia where the owner had been threatened by guerrillas over extortion payments, police said. The killings were the second massacre in a week attributed to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
The bodies of at least 211 victims of right-wing paramilitaries were found on Saturday in mass graves in southern Colombia. ”We are again shocked at how gruesome this war is,” said Interior Minister Carlos Holguin on Saturday. Since 1999, the paramilitaries have waged war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia for control of the region.
Several thousand people were evacuated after a volcano erupted in southern Colombia, triggering an avalanche that swelled rivers and threatened local communities, authorities said on Wednesday. Tumbling waters carrying trees, rocks and mud forced about 5 000 people to leave their homes for safer ground.
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/ 25 October 2006
It is 2am on Sunday and the phones never stop ringing at the Caracol radio station in northern Bogota. The light banter that normally entertains listeners to the graveyard shift is missing. This weekly radio programme, Voices of Kidnapping, reaches out to the thousands of hostages held by illegal armed groups across Colombia.
One of the world’s most hunted drug traffickers — whose criminal organisation compared in size to that of late drug lord Pablo Escobar — has been arrested in Brazil as part of a major international bust. Brazilian authorities said on Wednesday that Colombian-born Pablo Rayo-Montano, who had been on the run for a decade, was captured the day before at his home in São Paulo.
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/ 29 October 2005
Beta was upgraded to a hurricane by the United States National Hurricane Centre early on Saturday as it continued to whip the Colombian island of Providencia with high winds and rain. The hurricane is expected to move north-northwest and slam into Central America by Sunday as a category-two storm.
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/ 13 September 2005
Colombia’s government questioned its own airline security measures and ordered an immediate review after a father in a wheelchair dodged a security check to sneak hand grenades on to a plane and hijacked it along with his son. The father and son finally surrendered five hours after commandeering the Aires airliner on Monday.
The Colombian army said on Friday it has seized -million-worth of cocaine belonging to leftist guerrillas that was hidden in a cove on the outskirts of a city near Venezuela’s border. Three people with suspected links to the National Liberation Army were arrested during the raid on Wednesday.
At least 30 rebels died in an aerial bombardment of their camps in northwestern Colombia, authorities said on Wednesday. Colombian Air Force combat aircraft bombed three rural areas along a border between the provinces of Antioquia and Choco, west of Medellin, where rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) were camped.
Failure to help with the kids and the dishes could soon be grounds for divorce in Colombia, if a proposed law gets passed. ”Men treat women like slaves who wash the dishes while they relax,” said Senator Carlos Moreno de Caro, the Bill’s author. ”This injustice has to end,” he said.
The Colombian government said on Tuesday it will evacuate 9 000 people living near a volcano in south-west Colombia amid concerns it is about to erupt. The Galeras Volcano Observatory last month set its new warning system at level two, indicating a ”probability of an eruption within days or weeks”.
A Colombian town has taken a hard line against gossip, with fines of up to 000 (R38 200) and three years in jail. ”Residents come out with things that they have no reason to say, that are mere gossip and that have even gotten people killed,” said Margoth Morales, city manager of Iconozo.
Resilient rebels. Rebounding drug crops. Rogue American soldiers snared in plots to smuggle cocaine and funnel stolen ammunition toparamilitary death squads. The bad news has been piling up fast, almost five years after the United States began doling out -billion under its Plan Colombia aid programme to wipe out cocaine and heroin production and crush a long-running leftist insurgency.
A Colombian football fan has won the right to change his name to that of his favourite club, but only after a tortuous seven-year legal battle. The ruling handed down on Friday by the country’s Constitutional Court allows the 55-year-old supporter to call himself Deportivo Independiente Medellin Giraldo Zuluaga.
A top United Nations anti-drug official has predicted cocaine prices in the United States and Europe will rise next year, reflecting the fruits of a six-year, US-funded effort to eradicate drug production in Colombia. ”Considering Colombia supplies 80% of the world cocaine market, we think prices are going to rise starting in 2006,” the official said.
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/ 18 February 2005
The presidents of Colombia and Venezuela met in Caracas this week to patch up frazzled relations after the worst diplomatic row between the South American neighbours for decades. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe was greeted with a 21-gun salute on his arrival in Caracas to meet Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, who barely a month ago had threatened to break off commercial and diplomatic relations.
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/ 11 February 2005
Peace is possible in Colombia despite its four decades of civil war, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday, pointing to harmony achieved in South Africa after decades of racial strife under apartheid. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate gave the optimistic outlook during a speech at a peace symposium in the south-western city of Cali.
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/ 17 November 2004
The Colombian government will allow hundreds of families left homeless after a strong earthquake to move temporarily into houses and country estates seized from drug traffickers, officials said on Tuesday. The quake, registering a powerful 6,7 on the Richter scale, hit early on Monday and injured 12 people.
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/ 15 November 2004
An earthquake measuring 6,7 on the Richter scale hit the west coast of Colombia early on Monday, Colombian officials said, adding that no deaths have been reported from the quake thus far. The quake hit at 4.06am local time, according to Julian Villarroel, director of Colombia’s Institute of Geology and Mining.